The current stage3 tarball with baselayout2 is broken. If you used an April 2011 stage3 tarball, that has baselayout1 and you may have different problems if you missed the baseylayout upgrade guide.

The content of its /dev is wrong, it contains only a normal file called null of zero length. A minimum of three character device special files are needed for udev to start and the boot process to proceed normally. Taken from a working system ...

This will allow udev to start to make the rest of your /dev nodes, once it gets started.
According to the baseylayout upgrade guide, OpenRC no longer starts udev by default
Its not set to start in the current stage3 either.

ld c3 respawning too fast... no more processes left in this run level...

after writing this post, it shows a bunch of cannot execute /sbin/agetty messages

i built gentoo on a virtual machine under ubuntu. i am getting ready to flip flop, i like source based distributions better than binary. when i delete my ubuntu im gonna install windows7 on the hard drive, need more video games, then make a gigantic gentoo partition for virtual machine management.

i wish someone would come along and make a simple ALFS + portage script / install cd =( i like ALFS for its simplicity and that everythings being generated from source.

no more processes left in this run level... solved

It was a problem with fstab

The root and boot filesystems had 'user' appended to them.

booting now =D easy enough.

only problem is no users/root to log in now ?? i must of forgotten to set a password as chroot for su.... next install ill remember to do that.

i took what i learned and moved it over to a physical computer. new stage3 for june 4th. it still unpacks incorrectly, and this fix still works for it and boots the instilation. your commands do not work from the live cd. they should be......

Have reinstalled Gentoo 3 times yesterday, tough was some kernel miss configuration or file system corruption since mounted root as read only always >.<, thanks for the fix Neddy._________________DiegoMichel.orgVersosdeamor.info

Yep, I had to fix this in Funtoo Linux when we switched to baselayout 2 -- around September 2008. I added a tweak to Funtoo's baselayout to create the device nodes. You will likely need to tweak catalyst as well as baselayout. You should also force baselayout maintainers to build stage3s. One of the Funtoo "rules" is that all core team members need to use Metro (our catalyst) to build stages regularly. This way, these problems tend to resolve themselves rather than get passed on to releng.

Thanks, Neddy, you just made my day --- after doing my gentoo install (by far not my first, I'm definitely no novice here ), I was sitting dumbstruck in front of my new T420 and watched the boot stop after "freeing unused kernel memory". I had a vague idea that this might be related to the contents of /dev, but you saved me propably hours of experimenting and searching. Any chance that this will get fixed soon in the stage3 tarballs?

I found while following the steps above that the files you were asking me to create were already present - I replaced them, but maybe that lends some insight into why I'm not getting any results from this.

udev was not present in the sysinit runlevel until the link was added.